


The last man alive

by chimosa



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-04-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 13:48:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1472119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chimosa/pseuds/chimosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re dead,” I say, palms sweating, slicking the warm metal of my gun. </p><p>“I should say so,” Beverly answers, hand sweeping down the ravaged expanse of what the Ripper left of her body, lit by the palest spill of moonlight from the window.  </p><p>
  <i>Spoilers up to Yakimono</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“I saw Abigail today,” I say into the silence between us. It’s an unconsidered admission, spoken out of habit before I can stop myself. Hannibal’s blond eyebrow raises, such a small action but it’s enough to make me amend myself, albeit through gritted teeth.

“ _Thought_ I saw.” Hannibal’s face smoothes into that familiar mask, a well-considered and crafted facsimile of humanity, far more life-like than my own. “I know the difference between reality and delusion.”

 _Now I do,_ remains unsaid but we both can taste the words, thick with bitter recriminations. Hannibal’s head tilts and I know he savors my disillusionment; always the connoisseur.

“I should hope so.”

“I’ve had ample opportunity to study the two, to examine the differences.” I lean forward to rest my elbows on my knees, fingers steeple deliberately. I look, really look, into those dark, depthless eyes. “I won’t be confused again.”

Here is Will Graham, upgraded and calibrated to Hannibal Lecter’s specifications. I have no fear of death, no Alana to lose, no Jack to disappoint. I’ve been dissected and discussed. My body and mind have been scraped bloody to discover what secrets I’ve hidden and what secrets have been hidden in me. For so long I’ve walked the tightrope of sanity, arms waving, desperate, for equilibrium. Equilibrium that was always so momentary, so fleeting. Well, now that I’ve proven, in word and deed, I am every bit the monster Freddie Lounds has touted me to be, there’s no reason _not_ to step into the howling cavern of madness. 

If it’s an intelligent psychopath that Hannibal wants to play with, then it’s an intelligent psychopath that Hannibal will get.

“We will just have to see,” he says with a smile.

***

“You’re dead,” I say, palms sweating, slicking the warm metal of my gun. 

“I should say so,” Beverly answers, hand sweeping down the ravaged expanse of what the Ripper left of her body, lit by the palest spill of moonlight from the window. 

“This is not a hallucination.”

“It’s not.” Beverly flips on the overhead light and the yellow is so ordinary it’s almost blasphemous, considering the extraordinary horror of her body. 

Balanced between panes of glass, a specimen vivisected, she was something nightmarishly transcendent. 

Here, she is just a nightmare. 

“Look, do you have some fishing line? And a needle?” 

She settles in and spends the next few hours sewing together the slices of her abdomen that gape open. I can see from my wary perch across the room that though the stitches she works now are delicately precise, her arms are held together with crude, jagged bands of black thread. 

“I’ve gotten better,” she says when she notices my attention.

“I guess you’ve had to.” 

“My mom would be thrilled. She tried to teach me how to sew I can’t tell you how many times growing up. Sewing, cooking, baking, quilting; all the domestic arts. But I was never interested.” She pauses to snip away the line she’s just tied off somewhere around her ribcage. “I always wanted to be left alone with my microscope.”

She says microscope but all I can see is Beverly pressed between panes of glass. My friend, the specimen. 

“You’re handling this remarkably well.”

Needle sinks into unresisting flesh, rows like ellipses dotting white, bloodless skin. 

“I’ve decided to embrace madness.”

“We’re all mad here,” she quips, sardonic smile.

The banter, the expression on her face, it’s all so painfully familiar. I half expect to see a white coat draped over her shoulders, can practically smell the stinging, sterile cleanness of the FBI’s morgue. Something in my chest tightens; it’s the first time I’ve let myself feel anything since I was released from the mental facility. 

“Beverly,” I say, laying the gun in my hands down on the coffee table beside me. We both know I have no intention of using it, so why continue the charade? The tightening in my chest twists painfully, regret makes my voice breathless. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Will.”

“I’m the one that sent you-”

“Stop,” she says firmly. “Seriously, just stop. I am a rational, autonomous adult. I chose to help a friend, to investigate the lead he gave me.”

“But if I hadn’t-”

Beverly stands, crosses the room until her hand is on my shoulder, the cold touch of death. “Hannibal Lecter killed me. Not you.”

I stare at the black spiderweb that marches up her arm and disappears under her t-shirts’ sleeve. 

“What did he do to you?”

“What did he do to us,” she corrects gently. “I’m not the only one, you know.”

***

They visit me. 

One by one, they all visit me. 

There’s no telling when they will come- no phase of the moon or special hour of the night. I’ve been visited by Cassie Boyle over dinner and have woken from a nightmare-riddled sleep to find Abel Gideon, amputated and surly, staring at me from a surprisingly sleek electric wheelchair.

Then there are the others, the ones that I have no names for. Some missing tongues or kidneys or lungs. Some I’ve seen on missing posters in Jack’s office. Others that have been forgotten, cleverly hidden as victims of spontaneous acts of violence, the ones whose deaths were so ordinary they never made it further than their local police blotters.

Predictably, the ones I dread the most are the cobbled together bodies of those I failed. 

Georgia Madchen never comes, but Abigail does, and it’s anticlimactic because I’m already three hours into a bottle of particularly terrible bourbon. 

“So this is what you do now?” she asks finally, after watching me wordlessly for so long I’d begun to think he had eaten her tongue.

“Seems appropriate.”

“So much for avenging my death.”

The next swig comes too fast, I tell myself. That’s what’s to blame for the burn in my chest; not her words. 

***

“How are you sleeping?” Hannibal asks, felicitous and bland as ever, knees not a foot from mine. He’s been moving his furniture again- we are practically touching as we face off in his impeccable and grand office- though to what purpose I can’t say.

I meet his eyes, knowing full well my own are bloodshot from too much drink and not enough sleep.

“Better than ever,” I say and he smirks at the lie.

***

“It’s the cannibalism, I think,” Beverly says.

The dogs don’t so much as stir. They’ve gotten used to my nightly visitors, better than I have.

“Make yourself at home,” I say, fumbling to put on my glasses. I wince as my unsteady hands drive a temple tip squarely into my eye. 

“All of us have something Hannibal took, something he ate. That’s why the Ripper’s victims are walking around like Shaun of the Dead and the ones he copied aren’t.”

“Sounds plausible,” I say, rubbing a hand through my hair. Overgrown already, but fuck if I can make myself care. The only person that sees me anymore is Hannibal at our weekly sessions. I’m finally the recluse Alana always worried I’d become, shut off from the civilized world in my little house. Living off the land, nothing but my dogs and guns to keep me company.

Nothing but my dogs, my guns, and the occasional corpse.

The bourbon’s gone, but there’s beer in the fridge, which I stumble to. When I come back, I can see Beverly picking absently at a fraying stitch on her cheek.

“I want to die.”

“Seems redundant,” I say, not unkindly, as I crack open a can of Rolling Rock.

“There has to be a way, I just need to figure it out.”

“You could always ask Hannibal. I’m sure he knows.”

Beverly’s eyes, milky with death, go wide. 

“I don’t think I could do that. I haven’t seen him since...” her voice trails off, her hand tugging at the stitch with purpose now. I let her, even though I know she’ll only have to sew herself back together with my fishing line.

I don’t know what I expected. The lot of them living together in Hannibal’s basement, sneaking out at night to roam the streets of upper-class Baltimore, frightening the moneyed elite? The reality of these shambling corpses aimlessly wandering about with no agenda is depressing.

“Then I will.”

***

Our standing appointment is three days away, which is plenty of time for drink to soften the urgency of Beverly’s plight, but miraculously I remember. 

It’s hard to remember much these days, when sleep is illusive and the days bleed together like the crimson-soaked floor of a certain kitchen in Minnesota. 

When I ask, Hannibal’s face goes still, wiped clean of all expression, and it’s so near to the antlered man-creature that lingers the fringes of my unconscious I’m surprised I ever questioned for a moment whom it could have represented. 

Even without the darkness clinging to his skin, the likeness is uncanny. 

“Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

I’ve never seen Hannibal at a loss for words, but that’s what seems to be happening. I realize that until this moment, our talks have lingered in the alleyways and side streets of insinuation. Hannibal is a master of puns, if you’ve the morbidity to follow his meanings, always alluding, always suggesting, but never stating outright. 

This is the first we’ve spoken plainly about my nocturnal visitors, about the things that he’s made that walk the earth when they should be laying in it. 

I am reminded of what I told Chilton all those months ago, how I urged him to shine a light on Hannibal. 

I should really learn to take my own advice. 

The answer comes not by word but by deed. Alana’s car rumbles up my drive and I don’t need to see the file she is holding tight in her whitened knuckles to know a clue when it’s been practically gift wrapped for me.

Deja vu, all over again. 

“It’s Jack,” she says and that’s almost inconsequential.

“Do you have photos?” I ask.

Her disgusted face would have cut me to the quick not too long ago, but now it barely registers. 

“Is he missing anything?” 

“It’s hard to tell, he was burned beyond recognition.” 

I open the file, study its contents.

“It’s _Jack_ ” she says again, like I hadn’t heard her the first time, like I was too slow to grasp the horror of her words.

“Who could do this?” She demands. I stare at the charred man in the photos so I don’t have to see the barely-contained tears in her eyes that are present in her wavering voice.

“You know who, Alana,” I say, my voice as tired as I suddenly feel.

“Hannibal didn’t do this.”

“Sure,” I say, closing the file.

“You said he was the Ripper. There are no theatrics here. Jack isn’t displayed in any way. This doesn’t follow the Ripper’s M.O.”

“ _Intelligent_ psychopath,” I say, rubbing my eyes behind my glasses hard enough to see starbursts of white. 

When I turn toward the front door she crosses the porch in angry strides and pokes me accusingly in the chest.

“You say he’s a monster. At least Hannibal mourned when he saw the crime scene-”

“I’m sure he did,” I mutter.

“-you don’t even care! The only monster I see is-”

She stops short, mouth open, horrified at the words left unspoken, the ones she never meant to say. 

“Will,” she breathes, lips pale as the blood drains from her face. Once upon a time I would have stepped in, crushed those lips to mine. I would have held her close. I would have felt _something_. 

Now all I can see is how like Beverly, like Abigail, like Gideon, and the nameless others she looks without the blush of life staining her cheeks. But her death mask is momentary. 

“I never said I wasn’t,” I explain patiently, maybe even tenderly. “But he’s one, too.”


	2. Chapter 2

As it turns out, there is a reason Georgia Madchen is not amongst the living dead.

“Fire,” I tell Beverly the next time I see her. “If you’re sure you want to end it- really end it- then fire is your answer.”

She’s quiet, lost in thought. 

“Will you do it?” she asks hours later, after I’ve turned out all the lights and have just settled into bed.

“Now?” I ask, not bothering to open my eyes.

“No time like the present.”

Beverly is silent as I pour gasoline down her stitched-together body. She is silent when I bring out the house’s fire extinguisher and a box of matches.

“Will,” she calls out just as the fire engulfs her petite frame. “Thank you.”

I stay. There’s a practicality to it, of course- wouldn’t want to start a forest fire- but there’s more. I need to stay, to bear witness to this death as I couldn’t her previous one.

The smell of soot lingers far longer than it has any right to. Beyond showers and scrubbings, beyond the dawn of one day and straight through the dawn of the next.

I watch the skies as they pinken into a magnificent sunrise, the third blaze I’ve seen since the last time I sought sleep. Maybe its the insomnia, but I can feel something different floating on this morning’s breeze. Something that brushes against my face and cleanses me better than anything has since I watched my friend burn.

I know what I need to do.

***  
Abigail burns quietly, as does Cassie Boyle. 

Abel Gideon isn’t so keen on dying again, but then again I was never that keen on Abel Gideon. It isn’t a chore to light him on fire. 

One by one, I burn them when they come to my home, seeking me out. After a while, I begin to seek them out.

It isn’t hard. I’m not sure what Hannibal has been up to in those endless hours between appointments, I’ve never owned a television and the newspapers are piling up along my driveway, but I can’t go eight miles out of my way at night without coming across some new Hannibal Lecter creation. 

“Will Graham: Vigilante Revealed,” Freddie Lounds says when I open the door one morning. I can practically hear the clickbait in her voice. 

“Go away,” I mutter. I try to close the door but her fashionably heeled foot is in the way.

“That’s what they’re calling you, you know. You’re the mysterious hero to the terrified masses.”

“Did you come for a pull quote?” I sneer.

“Hardly,” she huffs, blocking my second attempt at closing the door with her arm. “I’m leaving.”

“I’ll try not to miss you. No guarantees, though.”

“I want you to come with me,” her voice is serious.

“Sentimentality, Ms. Lounds? I wasn’t aware you were capable of it.”

“I’m not. This back-from-the-dead thing, whatever it is, is getting worse. It’s an epidemic and we are at the heart of it,” she’s forced herself into my home now and the dogs are barking madly at the intrusion. 

“And the first person you thought about was me?”

“Don’t be obnoxious, the first person I thought of was _me_.”

“I expected no less.”

“You know how to kill these things. Really kill them.”

“It isn’t hard,” I respond.

“It’s getting harder all the time. Those things aren’t exactly happy to be put down, word is they’ve started fighting back,” she steps in and I’m forced to look into her eyes. “I want you to be my bodyguard.”

My initial reaction is to laugh and I don’t bother fighting it.

“I’m serious. I’ll pay you.”

“It won’t be nearly enough,” I tell her.

***

Sugarloaf Key is as nice a place as any to wait out the apocalypse. 

***

Freddie swears up and down she isn’t going to go nosing about once we finally settle somewhere. She swears the obsessive drive to _know_ has been subsumed by her desire to survive. 

“You don’t believe me?” she demands, nervous pacing bringing her to a stop in front of the little yellow kitchen table where I’m cleaning out my shot gun. 

“Can’t say I care one way or another.”

“Oh you care. You’ve got an empathy disorder, you’re practically _wired_ to care.” She points to where Milo and Winston are curled in front of the patio’s screen door. “Just look at how you treat those dogs.”

Although we agreed it wasn’t practical to take an entire dog pack on a road trip with, at the time, no destination in mind, I couldn’t just leave Winston behind. Not when he stuck stubbornly to my side while the others disappeared, one by one, into the woods, wild creatures returning to nature. 

Milo just sort of found us, three days after moving in to the little run-down beach front house, a toothy dog-grin across his mud-caked muzzle and in desperate need of a bath.

“Dogs I like. People, not so much.”

“You care enough to kill for me.”

“That’s not killing,” _can’t kill something that’s already dead, though the screams sound no different at times_ “That’s culling.”

“Semantics,” she scoffs with a wave of her hand. 

It’s quiet, this far away from the lights of civilization. 

“You were never as monstrous as we both pretended you were,” she says later, when dusk has turned to darkness and confessions seemed to come easier in the salt-infused air.

“Are you trying to sleep with me?” I ask finally, frowning, because I can’t see what Freddie’s angle is with a statement like that.

She laughs, surprised and a little cruel, and I know I’ve misread the situation completely. 

“Not even if you were the last man alive.”

***

“Lecter’s been traveling,” Freddie announces one day, kicking off her running sneakers at the door, her hair suspiciously dry and sweat-free. She claims to have taken up running whenever I go out to hunt or fish for the day. When she does, I pretend not to notice the car keys are missing from their perch on the kitchen counter.

“Oh?”

She sees the fish I’m wrist-deep in and makes a face.

“Do you have to do that in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” I say, slowly and enunciating carefully. It’s an old argument, one of the unfortunate side affects of having a roommate that can actually talk. “This is dinner. The kitchen is where dinner is prepared.”

“It’s barbaric,” she says with an authoritative toss of her uneven curls. In an attempt to prove she was self-sufficient she had tried, weeks ago, to give herself a haircut. The results were less than impressive. “There’s talk that the dead have started coming back to life somewhere in India.”

 _Mumbai,_ I supply silently. As much as I would enjoy watching her sulk- out-scooping Freddie Lounds is always good for free entertainment- I don’t want to explain how it is I know Hannibal Lecter’s whereabouts.

***

_**I wish you would tell me where you are.”** _

Hannibal’s voice rings in my head: loud and absolute. Even after all this time, I’m still not prepared for the pain it brings with it, searing bursts with every deeply spoken word that render me breathless. 

Nose bleeds have become a regularity with our weekly chats, and I’m careful to keep a towel at hand whenever 7:30 rolls by. 

The first time the antlered-man spoke to me in my mind’s eye, I wasn’t driving, though that was a miracle in itself. We were 400 miles from Wolf Trap and Freddie had insisted on taking the night shift. It was strategic, if we came across anything walking around that by the laws of nature shouldn’t be I could take care of them quicker without a steering wheel in my lap. 

“Are you okay?” she asked, swerving the car momentarily into the oncoming lane at my unexpected groan of pain.

I managed a nod, pinching at the bridge of my nose. My breath came fast and shallow, but I managed to pull myself together to try a tentative response.

_“Is this real?”_

Mocking from the voice that filled the empty spaces of my mind with its awful reverberation.

_**Weren’t you the one claiming to know the difference between reality and delusion?”** _

What I’ve learned since then is the line between the two is not so impregnable, after all. 

_I’m not telling, though I do appreciate the irony. Here you are, literally in my head and yet still there are parts of me you cannot breach. Freddie says you’ve moved on to Japan. Building a new world order, are you?_

_**I haven’t much to occupy my time, as of late. I’ve had to find ways to keep the tedium at bay.** _

_The Chesapeake Ripper is dead. Long live the Chesapeake Ripper._

The antler-man can’t smile, not without a face, but I can _feel_ Hannibal’s amusement, curling around my innards and settling strangely in my guts. 

***

Freddie is late coming home. 

Of course she took the car and it’s a long walk to get to anywhere she might have gone. I wander for the better part of two days, asking questions to the few left with a pulse I find during the day and laying waste to those without one I come across at night. 

“Please,” one man in khaki shorts and an unbuttoned floral print shirt pleads, voice quivering pitifully. There is a digital camera on a strap around his neck and a hollow where his heart ought to be. “My family is back at the hotel. My wife is expecting me. Don’t leave my children without a father.”

The blowtorch in my hand is sparked and ready to go to work, the blue flame cutting through the darkness of the island night. 

I let him go but take his rental car, driving all the way back to the little house with five dogs waiting eagerly at the door. 

I’m passed by quite a few cars with red bumper stickers that read “Lecter 2024”.

***

The door opens and even though it’s been a year, I still half expect to see Freddie in the kitchen, kicking off her running shoes. None of the dogs have ever met the man in my doorway- Winston has been long dead by now- still, they don’t so much as open their eyes. 

I wonder if their survival instinct is as dulled as mine where Hannibal Lecter is concerned.

He’s traded in his checked suits for a statesman’s navy. A solid crimson tie is affixed at his throat and I think fondly back to the colorful ones of years gone by. His face hasn’t changed, though. 

Mine has sunken in, I know, and he drinks in with his gaze the changes time has wrought on my body. Some days I can’t care enough to hunt for food. Those days have been coming with greater frequency, it’s taken it’s toll and made me leaner. I have scars that Hannibal wasn’t around for, and I watch his eyes flicker along, following the edges of one particularly nasty one that curls across my cheek. 

“There he is,” I say, not bothering to stand, slouching unconcerned into my armchair. “The Man Who Devoured the World. You always did have a vivacious appetite.”

“Hello, Will,” he says and I’ve gotten so used to the voice in my head that I’ve forgotten how quiet he actually is, how often I had to tilt my head in closer to catch the poisonous words that spilled from his lips. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve been a contributing member of society, but I could have sworn my sixth grade civics teacher said that those born in foreign countries are ineligible for President of the United States.

“It was ruled that, in my case, exceptions could be made.”

I laugh, wry and low. “You always were the exception, weren’t you? Tell me, how are you polling?”

“I’ve no complaints,” he says, stepping around the disarray that has accumulated over the years, peering with interest at the lure I’ve been working on.

“What?” I ask, feigning surprise. “I’m shocked you aren’t running unopposed.”

“I have opposition. Several opponents, in fact,” his mouth twists with a sardonic smirk that I have all-but forgotten, after all these years. “They are all campaigning to send the National Guard to South Florida. To find and execute the serial killer that has made this area his hunting ground for so many years.”

I can’t remember the last time I laughed. The dogs bark worriedly at the unfamiliar sound. 

My stomach hurts and there are tears in my eyes when I finally catch my breath enough to ask: “And what is your official platform?”

“I believe you should be captured,” he inspects the cuff of his coat, plucks at an imaginary speck of lint. “Rehabilitated.”

“Once a psychiatrist, always a psychiatrist.”

I stand, finally, facing him squarely. I meet his eyes, dark as an oil slick, and I know he can see in mine that I am unafraid.

“I won’t go quietly,” I say.

“I don’t expect you to go at all.”

“Subterfuge, Dr Lecter? Are you actually planning on lying to your constituency? That’s so out of character.”

“Will, enough.” 

I could feign ignorance- _enough of what_ \- needle him just to watch annoyance ripple across his face. But I’m tired, tired in a way that I can feel clear through my bones. There’s a weight in the air, like I’m already dead and buried; I can feel the thick shroud of graveyard dirt pressing down, claustrophobically dense. 

His fingers touch the sharp ridge of my cheekbone, warmer than I would have expected, more alive. 

I close my eyes and nod. Just once, my pride won’t allow for any more than that. 

Fingertips skim the exposed skin of my throat, lingering, considering. If I was expecting a swift death, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be getting it. 

His tongue is on my temple, tasting the day’s old sweat that’s accumulated in this humid summer air. 

“Don’t,” I say. I don’t want to be eaten, even if I know that I’m a meal Hannibal Lecter has been fantasizing about for a very long time. 

His lips meet mine, urging my mouth open with a commanding tongue and it’s been so long since I’ve felt the desire of another person, I can’t help but respond. My hands find his shoulders- broad, well defined shoulders- and I don’t know whether I’m trying to repel him away or hold on fast. 

Somewhere in the darkened annals of my memory I can hear the tinny recording of a woman’s voice. I can’t remember who she is, too much time has passed, but I do remember her words. They run though my head, repeating without pause as Hannibal’s nimble fingers remove my clothes and lay claim to my body. 

_“I was so wrong. I was so_ wrong.”


End file.
